Blogger's Corner - Fracking News

These Aren’t Your Grandpa’s Environmentalists

By
Pattison Sand Company
08 June, 2015

In 1909, the man who coined the term “Conservation Ethic,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot, engaged in a very public row with then U.S. Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger. Pinchot was concerned that Ballinger might be engaging in what we would today call crony capitalism through the preferential sale of the nation’s mineral, timber and hydrological resources to well-connected elites.

Pinchot did not seek to leave these resources untouched but quite the contrary; he wished to see them developed in a responsible manner to the benefit of his fellow Americans. Indeed, Pinchot would go on to define forestry as “the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man.”

By January 1910, the dispute between Pinchot and Ballinger had grown so heated that President William Howard Taft was forced to dismiss Pinchot, causing a split in the Republican Party and igniting a rift between Taft and Pinchot’s close ally Theodore Roosevelt. Two years later Roosevelt would mount a third party challenge to Taft, resulting in the election of America’s first progressive Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson.

Pinchot’s philosophy, that we can simultaneously preserve our environment and utilize its resources toward the economic benefit of the nation, was once so powerfully held by conservationists that it contributed to the end of five decades of near total Republican dominance in presidential elections (Grover Cleveland excepted).

Today that philosophy is largely absent in mainstream environmentalism. Little concern is paid to the costs of policy on working families and almost none for businesses. These days, environmentalists almost seem to have adopted the attitude that if it’s good for humans, it must be bad for the environment.

One of the latest green fads is to argue for a halt to economic growth. Let me state that again. A growing number of environmentalists are calling for an end to economic growth. Drive around Madison and you’ll see bumper stickers reading, “Growing the economy is shrinking the ecosystem.” These are not your grandfather’s environmentalists.

So what is the philosophy of modern greens? At times it can be hard to tell. Today’s environmentalists claim to support replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas and nuclear. Yet they oppose hydraulic fracturing to obtain the needed gas, building pipeline infrastructure to move it, or constructing any new nuclear facilities.

Other times their agenda seems contradictory. They oppose importing petroleum from Canadian oil sands even when the practical alternative is importing equally heavy crude from Venezuela with an even greater carbon footprint. They oppose proper forest management practices because ‘nature should be left untouched’ even when such policies contribute to larger and more destructive forest fires.

This growing inflexibility should concern business. As these ideas radicalize, their influence is growing. A common debate in political circles is whether or not the green movement has supplanted labor as the chief source of influence in the Democratic Party. Looking at Keystone XL and the War on Coal at the federal level or iron and sand mining in Wisconsin, the greens are batting a thousand whenever they play against labor. Wealthy donors such as fossil fuel investor-turned-environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has pledged $100 million to elect likeminded Democrats to the U.S. Senate this fall, are furthering the rise in influence of hardline greens.

Practically speaking, this means the partisan divide will continue to grow and our federal regulators at the EPA and other agencies will be more apt to push ever bolder and costly regulatory schemes. That’s bad news not just because it creates a drag on our economy but because when environmental policy becomes a political weapon, everybody – including the environment – loses.

The Pattison family has more than a 60-year history of contributing to their community and providing jobs and economic stability to the people of the region.

Today, Pattison Sand Company operates in Clayton, IA about 13 miles south of Prairie du Chien, WI on the banks of the Mississippi River. We employ upwards of 300 people. Pattison leads the charge towards American Energy Independence by producing industrial sand for the natural gas and oil industries. Pattison mines this sand from the St. Peter sandstone layer in both underground and surface mines.

Americans could be forgiven for thinking fracking poses an inherent threat to groundwater.

The anti-fossil fuel “Keep It in the Ground” movement has waged a multimillion-dollar campaign to convince the public of that exact claim, even though there has never been any evidence to support the accusation.

U.S. drillers have the ability to double the country's oil production to 20 million barrels a day, but doing so too soon would tank oil prices, Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm said Thursday.

Hamm, who made his fortune by pioneering new drilling methods in North Dakota's Bakken Formation, did not offer a timeline for when this would be possible, but it would certainly be a difficult task. Surging U.S. production since 2008 was largely responsible for creating a global oversupply of oil that sent prices spiraling from more than $100 a barrel to $26 this past winter.

Hillary Clinton’s promise during a debate Sunday to aggressively regulate fracking deepens the divide between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates on oil and gas development and signifies her continued shift to the left on environmental issues.

In the Democratic presidential debate in Flint, Michigan against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton said she wouldn’t support fracking in states or local communities that don’t want it, if it causes pollution, or if the chemicals used aren’t disclosed.

"By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place," Clinton said.